Performance dropped significantly after removing a malfunctioning battery

M

mahbar

Member
Hi

I am sorry posted accidentally without detailed.
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I removed my battery because I am worried about fire, details here.

To my surprise removing the battery significantly caused GPU to throttle to 345 MHZ and frame rates to drop from over 60 to 18.
I am using RTX 3070 Max Q 8750H Recoil III laptop.
Does that mean the power brick is not able to deliver enough power and that the battery always contributed power while gaming even if the device is plugged?
I never noticed battery drain while plugged in and gaming when I was using the battery.
 
M

mahbar

Member
@andjef796 @Martinr36
Thank you very much for helping me with this issue.

I opened the laptop again and nothing looked out of ordinary.
So I kept it open upside down and connected external monitor and keyboard/mouse, turned it on and noticed the weird limit of power and clock speed of the GPU in particular after opening the game.
So while the game is open I closed the lid to put the computer to sleep and connected the battery opened the lid a little and resumed the game and clock speed jumped to over 1300MHZ, frame rate up to 144FPS
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So I confirmed that it has something to do with removing the battery.
It's either a hardware issue where the power from the brick is not enough (unlikely) or it's a software issue where the power limit gets lowered when the battery is removed.

I checked the power plan after removing the battery and it's on High performance.
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I changed power plan to 'MyGamingMode' and the problem persists.

I tried closing after burner but the problem persists.

The GPU apparently under volt to 0.6v when the battery is removed for some reason which limits the power significantly.
 
M

mahbar

Member
Scott said:
This is definitely a new one on me. It may be by design but you would need to contact PCS to find out unfortunately. If you do get an answer to the query could you post back?
Click to expand...
Thank you. Just sent to the technical support. I will get back here once they get back to me.
 
Bhuna50

Bhuna50

Author Level
Never heard of that happening. I can understand a laptop reducing performance when on battery only, but when on power and battery removed.....??!!??

Out of interest when you ordered the laptop what power charger choices were available? I wonder if it requires more power than your charger can provide (on my Opt Pro, I was given a choice of 150 or 180) or, and this is only me speculating as I dont know how it would work if there was, but is there a fault with your power charger that isnt delivering enough?
 
M

mahbar

Member
andjef796 said:
Never heard of that happening. I can understand a laptop reducing performance when on battery only, but when on power and battery removed.....??!!??

Out of interest when you ordered the laptop what power charger choices were available? I wonder if it requires more power than your charger can provide (on my Opt Pro, I was given a choice of 150 or 180) or, and this is only me speculating as I dont know how it would work if there was, but is there a fault with your power charger that isnt delivering enough?
Click to expand...

I don't remember having a choice.
I checked the brick now, it has 19.5v 9.23a, so roughly 180w.
When I chose upgrade now I am only offered the 180w option which I already have.

1610622973511.png


Perhaps the charger is malfunctioning.
 
Bhuna50

Bhuna50

Author Level
I dont know - its only me speculating on that as if it is faulty, I dont know if the laptop would actually be turning on - wait to see what PCS say.
 
Scott

Scott

Behold The Ford Mondeo
Moderator
Just one thing out of curiosity. Are you powering down the laptop and then taking the battery out? If not, it's worth trying that. Shut down completely. Remove the battery and then restart.
 
M

mahbar

Member
Scott said:
Just one thing out of curiosity. Are you powering down the laptop and then taking the battery out? If not, it's worth trying that. Shut down completely. Remove the battery and then restart.
Click to expand...
Thank you for pointing to this. Yes I did power down the device completely before taking out the battery the first time and I noticed the performance hit.
To check if the battery was the cause I plugged the battery while sleep during a game, but the problem was before this experiment.
 
Null_Spectre

Null_Spectre

Member
I've come across this before with some Dell laptops, but varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. They tend to ship their laptops with an AC adaptor that is underpowered during peak energy demands. In this case your gaming sessions are a serious peak in energy demand.

Apple do this also with their Macbooks which are woeful for swollen batteries, as soon as the battery is removed the OS downclocks the CPU to prevent it from drawing more power than the AC adaptor can handle.

The battery compensates for the loss of power that the AC adaptor just can't provide. It would explain why your laptop underperforms without a battery in place.

Not sure why this choice is made for some gaming laptops, could be to cut costs in some way?

Seems more of an annoyance especially in cases where the battery needs to be removed for safety reasons.

All in all hope your battery issue gets sorted soon.
 
M

mahbar

Member
OK, finally support got back to me on Jan 26th.

First and foremost, thank you for getting in touch with us and for your patience with this reply.

Please note with our laptop high-end performance design. The system would require the battery and mains plugged in to increase the performance utilisation.

With our laptop designs, this will tend to draw in more power from either the battery or mains to give you the performance needed when running high-end programs.

What I can advise if you are comfortable going inside the machine.

Make sure the system is turned off and disconnected from the mains if applicable remove the battery as well.

1) Reseat the RAM modules.
2) Perform a CMOS reset (Lithium coin battery of the laptop).

Otherwise, I would recommend replacing the battery of the laptop.
Click to expand...

Even though the answer is not clear, it seems that the power brick alone doesn't deliver enough power for the GPU during gaming. Before I bought this one I knew that some laptops with small and light power bricks have this drawback. But I didn't expect PC Specialist III to have that since the power brick is 180w. Also I never noticed battery draining while gaming when connected to power.
Perhaps it's a misconfiguration from the bios where it assumes the power is not enough from the power brick (even though it is) and just downclock the GPU.
Reseating the RAM is meaningless since when I put the battery back it works just fine.
Resetting the CMOS might help. I will try that later.
 
Macco26

Macco26

Expert
It's quite normal these days that the power is shared among Battery and Brick. It's a firmware decision to underperform in the unlikely case something of those are missing.
It's not so rare to see laptops actually loosing charge while gaming a lot of hours. That's why the juice delivered from the battery to the PC is higher than the recharging power. Go figure.
In the end: you need to get a replacement battery. End of the story I guess.
 
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